[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Dealing with 2038

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Friday, May 09, 2014 05:16:34 PM H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 05/09/2014 03:33 PM, Josh Triplett wrote:
> >>
> >> I think an important distinction is that the majority of systems that
> >> will be seriously affected are embedded machines, which run a custom
> >> user space anyway.
> >>
> >> x86-32 PCs and end-user distros are going to be largely extinct
> >> in a couple of years and replaced by x64-64 or arm64 depending
> >> on who you ask, and arm32 Android phones are going to be
> >> replaced with arm64 hardware shortly after, or they see an ABI
> >> break before then anyway.
> >> The typical embedded machines don't even use glibc, and they
> >> cross-build everything from source.
> > 
> > In particular, even systems that want some of the properties of 32-bit
> > on 64-bit hardware can use x32; the concern is with new systems that
> > don't support 64-bit at all.  Hence why we need to solve the problem
> > *today*, so that the devices we're building in the next few years will
> > survive 2038.
> > 
> 
> I used to think 32-bit devices would be extinct by the mid-2020s.  It is
> now obvious that not only will that be wrong, it will be wrong in the
> most dramatic way possible... simply because all the places where we
> currently have $0.25 8-bit microcontrollers running trivial operating
> systems we'll have $0.25 32-bit microcontrollers and a fair chunk of
> them will run Linux.  As we're getting to the point where the most
> expensive part of the microcontroller is the package, there is simply no
> reason to not have a powerful CPU with a real OS and minimize the amount
> of time spent programming the damned thing.
> 
> Not to mention that the Internet of Things is going to mean many of them
> are going to want to be Internet-connected.

Yeah.  And there's a good chance that some of them will still be kind of
doing something in 2038.

Rafael